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  1. Technology
29 January 2025

DeepSeek has exposed America’s AI fiction

The story which has pushed US tech companies to dizzying market valuations over the past two years is no longer convincing.

By Will Dunn

Everyone knows the old story about the space race: in the 1960s, Nasa needed to solve the problem of astronauts being able to write notes in space, so they spent millions developing a pen that could write in microgravity. The Soviets, the story goes, took pencils.

Most people also know this isn’t true. Pencil shavings, in the high-oxygen atmosphere of a spacecraft, are a fire hazard. The space pen was developed by a private company and sold to Nasa in a brilliant piece of marketing by the American businessman Paul Fisher.

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